Famously described by Edward Said as the onset of modern Orientalism, Napoleon’s mission in Egypt (1798 – 1801) was a watershed in the history of Europe’s interaction with the Middle East. Orientalism (1978), Said’s seminal and famously scathing critique of Western literary and cultural production about the Islamic world, has exerted lasting influence on critical debates, as well as sharply dividing opinions about such subjects as postcolonial studies and the legacies of imperialism in the Arab world. Rather than merely re-visiting Said’s work, this article will address the genesis of modern Orientalism as a discourse whose images are perfectly consistent with one another. By retracing the footsteps of two Western travellers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this article shows how Orientalism evolved into a self-contained web of tropes shaped by Western imaginations, wishes and desires instead of attempting to represent the contemporary Middle East. In so doing, it will shed new light on Orientalist ways of both knowing and explaining the Islamic world, at the same time as it re-examines the network of representations that features prominently in Said’s influential analysis.

This article will follow the route of Captain Charles Colville Frankland, who was born in Bath in 1797 and had risen to the rank of admiral by 1875.^[1] He was multilingual, widely travelled and, in Tony Lurcock’s phrase, a ‘hardened explorer’,^[2] who not only befriended the famous Lady Hester Stanhope (1776 – 1839) on his journey through the Ottoman Empire, but also wrote extensively about his exploits. In 1829, he published Travels to and from Constantinople (2 vols.),^[3] which was followed by Narrative of a Visit to the Courts of Russia and Sweden three years later. In both accounts, there is a complex tension between his frequent complaints about indigenous peoples, customs and institutions, and a readiness to shower praise upon specific aspects of the cultures he encounters. Visiting the Ottoman Empire only one year after the Janissaries had been abolished (1827), for instance, Frankland eulogises this move during his time in Istanbul. However, this does not prevent him from claiming ‘that the Ottoman nation is the bitterest enemy to the human race, and the severest scourge that ever was sent by Providence to chastise mankind’ (I, 187) when he is back in England. According to Frankland’s account of the Ottoman Empire, then, extant signs of imperial greatness and audacious reforms under Mahmud II (1808 – 39) alternate with pejorative stereotypes frequently gleaned from other accounts. Consequently, contemporary ‘critics thought little of his outbursts,’ as Reinhold Schiffer has explained, attacking him not only for the poor quality of his information, but also for being ‘too hasty a traveller to make his account valuable.’^[4] But the tensions in his writing, and the ambivalent nature of his feelings towards the Ottoman Empire, allow us to trace the emergence of Orientalist discourses in order firmly to root them in tangible historical and political circumstances – in this case, in the troubled Levant that Frankland experienced in the late 1820s.

But what, one might ask, is more compelling than visiting the Ottoman Empire and sharing first-hand experiences of it? Rather than relating his own adventures in the East, Frankland inserted ‘Remarks and Notes’ into his account, which he culled from Comte Antoine-François Andréossy’s Constantinople et le Bosphore de Thrace (1828). Andréossy (1761 – 1828), a Franco-Italian aristocrat, artillery general and diplomat, was crucially involved in East-West relations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He accompanied Napoleon on his invasion of Egypt and later served as France’s ambassador to the Sublime Porte from 1812 to 1814.^[5] But whereas the Comte’s judgments are much more benign than Frankland’s, and he respects the Ottoman Empire as a political entity in its own right, the Captain quotes selectively and strategically from Andréossy’s work in order to lend retrospective colour and weight to his report. In so doing, he exacerbates the divided and ambivalent representations of the Ottomans in his Travels at the same time as he helps us to understand Orientalism’s emergence as a citational system.

When after many ordeals, adventures and rare pleasures on the road, Frankland’s party finally reach Istanbul on 11 April 1827, the view from afar proves both singular and overwhelming for him: ‘No pilgrim ever hailed the towers of the Holy City with greater delight than did I, sinner as I am, the minarets of Constantinople’ (I, 89). Although many Englishmen of his time were familiar with the Sublime Porte, actually experiencing Istanbul’s panoramic views overpowered many of them, frequently resulting in the evocation of inexpressibility topoi. And once he was firmly settled in the city, he repeatedly framed favourable aspects of Ottoman life primarily in the language of taste and aesthetics. These raptures sometimes lead to unusually temperate verdicts that emphasise cultural commonalities rather than differences: ‘Indeed, I am sure that if we knew the language of this interesting people, and would try to become acquainted with them, we should find them more traitables and civilized than we are apt to imagine’ (I, 173).

From these first-hand encounters with Ottoman life, we may conclude that a plethora of novel impressions left their mark on Frankland’s mind, leading him to record his adventures in favourable terms. And viewed in this way, they echo earlier accounts of Western travellers, who were also fascinated not only by the Ottoman Empire’s geographical expanse, but also by the richly diverse cultures that inhabited it. For example, Henry Blount described the Ottomans as ‘the only moderne people great in action’ in 1636 and Henry Abbott, who crossed the Syrian Desert in 1789, adamantly claimed that the Arabs ‘are not treacherous, they are not wantonly cruel, nor unworthy of trust, nor hypocrites, nor are they mercenary.’^[6] Frankland, then, partially retained the tradition of representing the Islamic world in favourable terms at the same time as he participated in the genesis of modern Orientalist prejudice.

However, when he is no longer in transit and suddenly equipped with a well-stocked library after his return to England, Frankland’s idiosyncratic account of both greatness and degeneration drawn up en route suddenly gives way to an untimely obituary. Vis-à-vis ‘the increasing power, moral and physical, of all the nations around it’ the Ottoman Empire ‘remains nearly in the same condition as it did when first it forced its way into Europe, with this only difference, that it has long ceased by its warlike energies to terrify and to overcome the nations of the West’ (I, 189). His assertive employment of the term ‘the West’ evokes its opposite and suggests the emergence of a dichotomous epistemological grid. In this logic, the East is stagnant, if not regressive, and displays everything the West is not through ‘the handy figure of inversion’ which translates cultural difference into ‘anti-sameness,’[7] as Francois Hartog has shown. Accordingly, the West ascribes undesirable traits to the East in order to solidify its cultural, and ultimately political, supremacy. And although Sultan Mahmoud’s difference (‘the supposed Barbarian Emperor’[I, 2]) and his capability of reform, initially prompted Frankland to travel east, his ‘Remarks and Notes’ indicate Orientalist prejudices rather than cross-cultural curiosity. Adding that there is ‘no instance in history of the regeneration of such a people as this’ (I, 189), Frankland’s frame of reference not only subjects the complexities of contemporary Ottoman history to simplistic degeneration narratives, it also reduces the Sultan’s realms to a disposable political quantity.

Although Ottoman imperial culture proved enticing during his physical presence in the East, after Frankland’s return to England, the Ottoman world was suddenly comparable to ‘Europe in the darker ages’ and praise for the construction of aqueducts ‘belongs not to the Turks, but to the ancient Greeks’ (I, 183). Fond of antiquity, Frankland tries to discover the infrastructure behind Istanbul’s water supply but can only find one of ‘the great cisterns of Constantinople’ (I, 210). Since this subject buttresses his fierce Philhellenism, he is eager to include it in his account; but without being able to detect all the cisterns Andréossy mentions, Frankland simply resorts to quoting from the Frenchman’s book: ‘I shall merely note the three first that he describes, as being sufficient for my purpose’ (I, 210). The quoted passages gloss over his archaeological shortcomings, putting him in a position of discursive authority over the territories he had traversed:

The traveller will not fail to observe, that these great national works were raised, not by the Turks, but by the Greeks; and that the barbarians (although in some instances they have had the good sense to follow up the ancient system of conducting water to the capital,) have in general let these magnificent monuments of a polite age and people fall into ruin […]. (I, 213)

Frankland conjures up images of omnipresent decay under the auspices of Islam and the Ottomans. Yet his drastic judgment in this situation is based not on personal experience but on episodes gleaned from the Andreossy’s text. Here, citationality engenders authority and is put to political ends. But most importantly, this passage demonstrates how discursive systems evolve through the incorporation of seemingly authoritative material. Eventually, these systems develop into dominant paradigms, the textual constituents of which refer to each other rather than their subject-matter. Frankland’s account thus illustrates this complex socio-cultural process for what Said has called modern Orientalism at the same time as it contributes to its development.

But are all travellers in the East doomed merely to repeat the judgments and observations of their predecessors? And are there only repetitions without any differences whatsoever? Far from it! Whilst, as Gerald MacLean has argued, ‘Orientalism is a powerful system of citationality, a reassembly of familiar tropes selected, repeated, and modified from an established set of received wisdom,’^[8] we can unlearn both our Orientalist mindset and Western privilege by carefully reassessing the historical and political legacies of imperialism.^[9] By interrogating the past and its looming shadows in the present, textual representations of Europe’s significant Islamic others need not repeat and re-tell the antagonistic tales and dangerous myths of cultural clashes to which we have perennially been exposed. Rather, tales of the past, as well as the contexts in which they took shape, may point to viable futures beyond the extremes of Islamic terrorism on the one hand, and Western imperialism on the other.

Image: Napoleon in Egypt, 1867-1868, accessed here

[1] For a short account of Frankland’s life consult: Reinhold Schiffer, Oriental Panorama: British Travellers in Nineteenth Century Turkey (Amsterdam & Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999), 373-4.

[2] Tony Lurcock, ‘Not So Barren or Uncultivated:’ British Travellers in Finland, 1760-1830 (London: CB Edictions, 2010), 178.

[3] Charles Colville Frankland, Travels to and from Constantinople in 1827 and 1828, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (London: Henry Colburn, 1830), 180. All further references are to this edition. Roman numerals indicate the respective volume.  

[4] Schiffer, Oriental Panorama, 374.

[5] For a detailed account of Napoleon’s time in Egypt compare: Juan Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

[6] Compare: Blount, Henry, A Voyage into the Levant (London: John Legatt, 1636), 2; and Henry Abbott, A Trip…Across the Grand Desart of Arabia (Calcutta: Joseph Cooper, 1789), 12.

[7] Francois Hartog, The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in the Writing of History, transl. by Janet Lloyd (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 212-13.

[8] Gerald MacLean, ‘Strolling in Syria with William Biddulph,’ Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 46: 3 (2004), 415-439, here: 433.

[9] Donna Landry, ‘Saddle Time,’ Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 46: 3 (2004), 441-58, here: 445: